


The Wind Beneath Your Wings

by StormLeviosa



Series: Batman Bingo 2020 fics [6]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Batfam Week 2020, Batman Bingo, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson is Robin, Father-Son Relationship, Feels, Gen, Haly's Circus, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Loss of Parent(s), Magic, Magical Realism, Mother-Son Relationship, Romani Dick Grayson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24950791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormLeviosa/pseuds/StormLeviosa
Summary: Dick is born with his Papa's bones, light as a bird's, and his Mama's eyes, blue as a summer sky. He can hear the wind singing just for him.It changes nothing.(Written for Batfam Week Day 6 - Magic/Fantasy)
Series: Batman Bingo 2020 fics [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1625461
Comments: 5
Kudos: 137





	The Wind Beneath Your Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Literally months too late I got an idea for one of the Batfam week prompts and this is the product of that.

Dick is born with a Grayson’s bones. The nurses take him away to be weighed and measured and they tell Papa that he’s like a baby bird. “So light he could fly away,” they say and when Papa says “that’s the plan” with an overjoyed and terrified gleam in his eyes that might or might not be tears they laugh nervously because they don’t understand the joke. They don’t know that all the Graysons, all the way back to Ferka Grayson who first joined the circus and learnt to work the ropes and swings and  _ fly,  _ have had bones lighter than air _.  _ And even though Papa tells them this, even though he tells them that Grayson’s are always small and light, that their bones are hollow, they look at his strong, sturdy legs - still in their lycra from that final performance - and his muscled shoulders, and laugh until they snort. Because a man so built, while short, cannot have the bones of a bird. A man like him cannot fly. This is how Papa tells the story of Dick’s birth and he never grows tired of it.

After the day he is born, Dick does not cry until he can laugh. Once he learns to, he laughs a lot: when he sees his mama and papa, when he sees the clowns Waldo and Harry, when Elinore waves her trunk near his chubby fists. His family smiles; his family laughs, and so does he. He laughs before he can talk and walk and do anything more than stare out at the world with those huge, happy eyes.

Dick is born with his mother’s eyes: bright blue like a summer sky with wispy clouds racing across. They are eyes that made Papa fall in love, eyes that gleam and flash with joy and passion and mirth in equal measure, eyes that stand out from her dark skin. Dick loves her eyes, and loves when people tell him he looks like his mother. She teaches him to count on his fingers and toes, how to read from the ancient books that she won’t let him hold in his grubby hands but lets him follow along as he sits in her lap and she reads aloud. When he turns six, she teaches him to make kites from the thin paper rolled up above the shelves of the trailer and flexible willow wands they cut from trees in the last three countries they stop in. She takes him to the tallest hill and shows him how to let out the line and reel it in, how to swoop and dive and twirl, how to make the kite dance in the air. The wind almost whips Dick’s kite from his hands as he lets out the line and he feels Mama’s gentle, calloused hands on his. “Do not fight the wind,” she tells him. “She just wants to play. Let her.” And Dick’s kite does not get tangled like he feared, does not get cut loose or tear on a branch, it soars like a bird and Dick is so, so jealous.

Every week, Mama takes him to fly the kites. Papa is not allowed to come because this is what Mama’s father taught her and what his father taught him and so it goes, all the way back to the first kites ever to fly. It is a family tradition, just as him learning to tumble and walk tightrope and hang from the bars of the trapeze is a Grayson family tradition. So Mama holds his hands in hers and whispers in his ear how to feel where the kite is without seeing it, how to use the tug and slack of the breeze, how to ask (not tell; you never tell the wind) for more or less from it without fighting. He learns from Mama how to listen to the wind, when she wants to play and when she wants to rest; when she wants to swoop and soar and when she wants to twirl round and round. And one day, when he is almost seven, he feels the wind settle and sigh and he says “Mama, she’s tired. We should go home,” and Mama’s smile is so wide that it crinkles the skin around her eyes and her teeth shine white in the sun.

The first time he tries the trapeze, he falls. It is an accident, but then most falls are, and it does not scare him in the slightest. He gets right back up and tries again. There is no net because the Grayson’s never use a net, but the platform is lower than when his parents perform so that if he falls, when he falls, he will not break his hollow bones. He grips the swing and leaps, hears the wind whistling by his ears and fluttering in his face, and when it is time, when the whistling softens and the fluttering starts to slow, he lets go and  _ flies.  _ He will fall again, many times, but always he will get back up. That is the way of the Graysons. 

He practises tumbling, practises kite flying, practises everything his parents give him, and when he does his first quadruple somersault Mama starts to sew his first costume. Mama is always sewing: he tears his clothes more than anyone else. But Mama says she doesn’t mind the extra work, says it keeps her fingers strong and her eyes keen. In Paris, he joins them for his first ever performance and even though the lights blind him and the music muffles the whispers of the wind, he flies just like Papa, just like Mama, and the awed hush of the crowd is addictive. He waves and beams and he feels lighter than air, like he could float away on the slightest breeze.

Mama calls him “Robin”, calls him “her little bird” when he flies. Papa says he is the best of all of them, the greatest of the Graysons. He was born for this, he knows. From the moment his parents met: Papa who learnt to fly without wings, and Mama who feels the currents and eddies of the wind in her blood and on her skin, his birth and rise and rise and rise was inevitable. Their fame precedes them in every town and people flock in from far and wide to see the magnificent Flying Graysons, the greatest trapeze artists in the world. When they reach Gotham, it is to crowds bigger than Dick has ever seen. He is not scared. He was born for this. 

He does not fall. The wind will not let him.

After, he goes to Bruce Wayne, goes to the enormous house, goes to the ground and does not rise anymore. He does not blame the wind: his parents fell from the swings not the leap and even through his screams he could see the wind tugging at them, trying to slow them, trying to lift them up. But even Papa’s hollow bones and Mama’s wind-touched eyes could not save them from the ground that came up too fast and hit them too hard. He does not go outside often. He cannot bear to feel the wind on his face without Mama’s hands on his, guiding him, without Papa tossing him up up into the air. He hides his kite, patched and worn with use, under his bed, folds his costume into the bottom of his wardrobe. He tries to forget the whispers of the wind, tries to forget when he felt her say “stop don’t go” seconds before he was meant to jump to his death along with his parents.

He cannot hide, cannot forget, and he uses Mama’s name for him because he’d rather keep her close than lose her completely. He hunts down Tony Zucco even though the wind tugs him back. It is the first time he resists her will, and the last. When Batman finds him, Zucco is beaten to a bloody pulp but Dick sits and says nothing and stares out from the roof. Batman goes to him first, wraps a warm and strong arm around his shoulder and for a moment it feels like Papa’s, like home, and Dick sobs.

When Robin takes to the streets people notice. He is bright; he is bouncy and he is  _ light.  _ Sometimes, he leaps a little higher than should be possible, swoops a little further. Grappling is easy for him when the wind tells him when to release and when to swing. The first time he heard a criminal say he was floating, Dick laughed but did not deny it. He couldn’t when he could feel the wind plucking at his heels. 

It is ironic perhaps that Dick’s favourite part of being a vigilante is falling. Falling is, after all, what killed his parents. But Dick has never been afraid of falling, has never needed to. He was born with a Grayson’s bones and his mama’s eyes and with the wind singing in his heart. Every time he falls, the wind will not let him hit the ground. She whispers “trust me,” and he does.

**Author's Note:**

> So a small note on the "magic" elements here: Dick can't control the wind exactly. It's more that he can feel the way it moves, and hear its voice and just works with it, similar to how you have to follow the wind when you're sailing (or flying a kite). It's still a kind of magic and it's still incredibly useful but it's not all-powerful, air-bending type magic. It's a combination of inherited traits: the Grayson's bird-like bones that are great for aerial gymnastics, and his mother's family's understanding of the wind. It's not _quite_ what the prompt had in mind I think, but it's close enough.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sending up a Golden Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29034231) by [thefirstneonphoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefirstneonphoenix/pseuds/thefirstneonphoenix)




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